Great book, very well written. Assigned in HS. Imagine.

Historically? Daggett picker, no contest. See also Jethro Tull.

Executioner for a falling regime would have to rate fairly high I’d think.

Pelican Parts Moderator?

the name certainly doesn't sound exciting or glamorous. The only work like that that was ever made to look exciting or glamorous was when someone was mounting explosives to the bottom of a boat in a war/spy/action movie.

Nope, anyone that thought that sounds glamorous, didn't read the whole name or think it through.

I'm pretty sure those guys aren't hanging at the beach with Jessica Alba in a bikini when they work.

Super sexy, super high paid position. Everybody loves them and wants to be them!

Grandpa talked about the early days and how they made hot dogs back then. He would not eat hotdogs until the day he died.

He had a few stories that he would laugh hard through the telling of them as they were funny many years later about the kill floor. Way back they just used a large man, with a sledge hammer that had more of a pick end on it. Swing and drop em. One bull evidently was just knocked out and he stood up after they had hauled him to the second floor where they slit the throat to bleed them. Men scattered and chaos eschewed.

To use a gun was too expensive for a bullet, and the pneumatic bolt used now was not available then.

Imagine that job. Swinging a 6 or 8 pound sledge into the skull of cattle to kill them, in a hot factory day after day for many months.

Perfect.

Do they have badge numbers?

I pay their salaries, dammit.

I can't even imagine. I've had jobs that I didn't like, but I don't kid myself now that any of them were bad jobs. Unpleasant maybe, but not bad.

“Fluffier” cracked me up Norm. Wife asked me what that occupation was.....

The guys that do the body removal for our office, is not a pleasant job. while I have to to the body processing, they are the ones that actually bag it up. Including scraping tissue and other matter off the road and stuff like that. Nothing like scooping up a 3 month old decomp off a mattress, or a body thats been soaking in a full bathtub for a few weeks.


.

dishwasher for a semester in college at a **** dance club/restaurant.

horrible music. health code violations everywhere. i had to bus tables too whenever my coworker didn't show up. about half the time. because of the horrible layout i had to cross the dance floor carrying a tub of glassware. i would get groped by god knows what.

this is all on top of the just grinding nature of dishwashing itself.




made me long to go back to baling hay.

One of my former co-workers grew up living next door to a house like in the TV show 6 feet under. That family owned funeral home. They did the embalming in the basement. His buddy was the kid next door that was born just a few days apart from my former co-worker and lived at the funeral home.

His first job was for the funeral home, doing body pickups. It was not too bad going to hospitals or nursing homes as the bodies were on a gurney, in a body bag or wrapped up. The bad part of the job was body removal from folks that died at home, and were not found for weeks. One lady committed suicide with a shotgun, while sitting in the bath tub. He and a helper had to put on hazmat suits and try to lift the obese lady out of the tub. When the legs came off in his hands at the lady's knees he puked in his suit, walked out of the house and quit on the spot. He walked home.

The "money shot" stand in..

Where's Livi???

Usually when I have a death decomp in a tub full of water, I have to go in the kitchen, find a long spoon or ladle and scoop tissue and stuff out of the drain to empty the tub. That's the nastiest.

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Paul, I'm sure many have walked in those kinds of shoes and survived - and thrived. My sister also did the same. She had a job in an elder care center. Those weren't the best of years. In my senior year, I was captain of the track team and would get friends to work for me when I had meets on Friday. The coach was nice enough to assign me a PE period during the day to work out. The work was very hard, & when one of the friends didn't show up (I'd pay them a bit more than I made), my employer said they needed to be able to depend on me to get the job done. It was hell for the older guys at the dairy to fill in. I decided I needed to quit the track team to ensure I kept the job. The coach was pissed. I never told him the reason. I think most kids wouldn't have.

I wouldn't do it either, but that's a pretty funny story.

No wet/dry shopvac? :D

You are one of the reasons why I still post here...just a fine man I admire.

I'll leave it at that.

Your punctuation is much improved, BTW.:D

Paul, thank you. I might hit you with a long rambling post with no paragraphs and random punctuation, just to drive you a little bit crazy.

And like any good wife, I'm sure she immediately volunteered.

_

sugar cane field worker

Holy http://forums.pelicanparts.com/suppo...s/pukeface.gif

I take back every mean thing I've ever said about the Chef/cooking industry.

As a little boy I had a summer holiday job as a chit shoveler.

I really did. New Zealand had a big industry in sheep's wool, and even the pooy bits around the sheep's bum had enough wool in it to make it worthwhile crushing it to get the wool out. But it had to be dried in the sun and shoveled around to dry all sides.

Lot of “Dirty Jobs” disgusting sort of stuff here... you guys have my admiration.
On the psychologically-tough spectrum, laying people off sucks. Not some jerkoff who basically begged you to let them go (although they never see it that way), but honest-to-God good people who may very well be the single bread winner and benefits holder of a family. Whether it’s a downturn, a takeover, or an off-shoring event, having to inform these sort of folks that they are losing their job is awful- and it stays with you.

Coal mining, lime pits, installing radio antennas, children's psych ward, prison guard, military scout. Nah.
I could do underwater welding though.

Personal staff to an Admiral. I yearned daily to get back to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Horn of Africa in order to be happier.

When my dad was offered a promotion to full bird but moved to the Pentagon, he said thanks but no thanks. He retired instead. He said he was not going to be a coffee making butler to some general. A full bird colonel is just a gofer at the pentagon, and you have to live in that area. No way he was doing that.

Rodbuster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNvgOO53q7M

Erector:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-8RrnsvFzA&t=50s

I work in the construction industry. The above are two different flavors of Iron Worker. You don't want to pick a fight with one of these guys. If a bench clearing brawl erupted on a large construction site, the last man standing might be a 180-lb Iron Worker.

similar/related, but less well known in the first world is sulphur "mining" and salt "mining" from salt water.

I've seen some articles and videos on third world folks mining sulphur from geothermal/volcanic active areas. The air is poisonous and the ground is caustic/acidic, and many of the folks barely have clothes and shoes much less PPE.

Similar for the folks that get salt from sea water. I've seen pics of them working manually in shorts and shirts, so the salt dries and cuts their hands and feet.

In India where the caste system has been outlawed for years, the low caste manually go into the sewers to unclog, and all of the photos that I've seen show them basically in a loin cloth to do it.

I once spoke to a guy that had been stationed in the same place that my family lived for a while.

He then regaled me with stories of how he got and kept cushy jobs where he didn't really have to do anything. I think he was a driver for a ranking officer.

I wasn't in the military, but it made me a little sick. But there are positions for warm bodies, I guess someone has to fill those positions.

I've had many "bad" jobs over the years.
The worst times were the couple of weeks (cumulative in lifetime) when I did not have a job.

Hard labor? It's good for you. Builds muscle and character.

Cleaning porta-potties?
Pays good, no one to tell you how to do your job and certainly no one trying to backstab you to steal your job. And you can hold your head high knowing you earned your way through life instead of being a parasite.

I've worked in a couple sewage treatment plants doing upgrades/revamps when I was a millwright. While disgusting at first, it was honest work and it paid my bills and provided for my family.

I worked in photography all my life, and only photography since I was 14. Many time with new trainee employees as we were struggling with production of some complex photo like a 4x12 foot photographic print for a TV set or convention display. I would tell the new guy "just think thousands of people all across the country are commuting home in a hurry to go play in their darkrooms. We do for a living what they do for a hobby" and most replied, let's get their butt in here to help.

Working in 100% total pitch black for hours at a time gets old. I spent a couple hours every day in absolute total darkness. I can tell you the crawling under a 64 inch wide photographic paper processor to fix a slow leak on a processor tank full of the bleach-fix sucks big time. I did it many times over the years. Or working and repairing the processors at all all sucked. I don't miss that part at all. Digital is a million times easier.

but, but...

...the good ol' days!

There were indeed good times back then. More good than not, by a lot. I worked at a business that was about a million dollars invested in a 5,000 square foot custom built building and 12 employees. We had a lot of state of the art stuff, and did great work. Most all of it can be replaced with just one person, one high end digital full frame sensor, Photoshop and a 60 inch printer and done better, faster and cheaper.

Attorney in the Army JAG Corps

They are light years ahead of United Airlines

Seriously. Look at the first link I posted. Rodbusters basically do work that is like tying your shoes all day long. Only with wire and rebar.

I know a guy who spent a week jackhammering a ceiling. let that sink in.

I've always ben industrious. I mowed lawns during jr high; that sort of thing. I've had 100's of jobs. My dad taught me how to get one and it worked every time. All I had to do was go back 2 maybe 3 times and I'd get hired.

When I was 13, 14, and 15, I went to my grandmother's farm for 2 weeks starting the day after school was out. My granddad died one year before I was born so my grandmother ran a 360 acre farm alone. She grew potatoes and cotton mostly.

Those 2 weeks were potato digging season and she had her own railroad siding as well as a processing and sacking shed. It was metal and the Bakersfield heat was usually around 100º midday in June. I had to get up at 5am and start filling water jugs for the workers with ice and water. After the line got up and running at 6:30am my job was to keep checking the conveyor belt under the main floor where the potatoes were washed, graded and sacked. The culls (sliced by the digger or rotten) got thrown down the holes in the floor to that conveyor and loaded into a huge hopper to be trucked out to an airfield to dry for livestock food.

Nothing wasted on a farm.

If that conveyor got stuck, potatoes spilled out everywhere under the shed. There was about 6' of headroom and chains and gears whirring like crazy. If the potatoes started pilling up because I didn't check often enough, I shoveled them back up on the belt. Now, if you've smelled rotten potatoes in 100º heat, you know what kind of job that was.

She paid me the same as the labor on the floor, about $1.25.hr. Thing is, they ran that line 10 hours a day six days a week for 2 weeks until all were dug. Do the math and I took home $250 bucks all said and done. I bought my first go kart with that money. I bought my first car, a '57 Corvette with some of that money.

She died at age 58, 3 days before my 16th birthday, so that was the end of that. Never worked on a farm since and that is something I might have missed out on.

There was so much more to a farm than rotten potatoes and I enjoyed so much of it as a youngster. If you can imagine driving a D2 Caterpillar at 14, you know what I mean.

That's a pretty bad one, it also can be dangerous.

A friends son in law is in the business. One Saturday, he was greeting the neighbors, having a couple of beers, and told them what line of work he was in. One guy called him a sick effer. Things escalated to argument and he went home, across the street. One of the aforementioned neighbors knocked on his door later in the evening, and brandished a pistol in his waist band. He said don't pull that gun mister, but he did. It misfired, and the son in law fired 5 well placed bullets. Some went through the man into the neighbors home. Another clean up on his front porch.

The article isn't exactly as I was told, but close enough.

https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/man-shot-to-death-near-elgin